I am developing a user interface for my application.... most of my application is portable as is written in c++ but today I started thinking about the UI. Which is currently written in Direct2D. I was wondering if there was an equivalent for developing a UI in IOS(Ipad), and OSX(MAC)?
Something high level enough that I could draw rectangles and circles, but also low level enough that is not as slow as GDI.
Thanks in advance.
PS. I DON'T want comparing which are better or worse, I just want to know what options I have.
CoreAnimation is a GPU-accelerated framework. Individual views are cached on the GPU. You can then apply composition arbitrary transforms to them. Such transforms are applied by the GPU to the cached image. So you can use CoreGraphics to draw a circle, rectangle or whatever, have CoreAnimation store that bitmap on the GPU and then transform that.
Also from the first-party frameworks, Sprite Kit provides a game-oriented framework that includes game-style (ie, accelerated write-once read-many 'sprites') drawing alongside physics/etc.
OpenGL ES is also fully supported. You can assume 2.0 is always available as it was introduced on the 3GS and Apple no longer accepts binaries for older devices. 3.0 is also available on the latest iPhone. That's obviously quite a bit lower level than Direct2D but Apple supplies GLKit which allows you to upload images trivially and to emulate the old fixed-functionality pipeline with just a few simple calls.
Out in the third-party world I guess the main thing people are going to suggest is Cocos2d but at this point it's already playing catch-up to Sprite Kit.
Of those, CoreAnimation, OpenGL and Cocos2D span iOS and OS X with some minor differences, Sprite Kit is already available on iOS and will turn up in the next OS X Mavericks.
Start with Cocoa (OSX) and Cocoa Touch (iOS). In apps made with those you can use Core Graphics which seems like a good fit for your needs, or OpenGL which is probably overkill. Of course there are many 3rd party libraries you can use, Cocos2d as Petesh mentioned is one of them.
As a budding game developer here, I am currently practicing with C++ and OpenGL graphics, and the desire is to assemble a skeleton project that I can both use for small game projects, as well as share with some friends with like interest.
The target is OpenGL 3.3+ (using no deprecated mechanisms such as 'glBegin' etc.), using the libraries SDL 2.0, GLEW 1.10.0 (with WGLEW) and GLM 0.9.4.5. I'm developing with Visual Studio 2012, and primarilly for Windows, but multi-platform compatibility is also desireable if possible to achieve.
The problem at hand is that I am now trying to implement Anti- Aliasing. Most sources appear to tell me that in order to achieve this, I first need to create a dummy context, in order to get access to certain OpenGL functionality, activating multisampling, and lastly spawn a proper rendering context. As described on [OpenGLs pages](http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Creating_an_OpenGL_Context_%28WGL%29"Creating an OpenGL Context").
What I ponder then, is this;
Most guides, examples and other, tend to either mix SDL-functionality and OpenGL calls, or build functions focusing entirely on OpenGL calls. While I would be able to reproduce this with some digital elbow grease; half the reason I desire to use SDL is not to have to manage window handles, pixelformats and such too much myself, but let SDL take care of this.
As such I ask you now;
Can I somehow create a dummy context, initiate things such as Multisampling and Anisotropy, and transfer into a proper context solely through support libraries such as SDL 2.0, or will I have to get my hands into the OpenGL API (preferably through GLEW then) and build a few launcher functions such as others have? If I need to myself, would not much of the purpose of SDL be lost?
I just can't find them anywhere. The most important part for me is the hardware acceleration, and I have no idea if there is a performance or openGL version compatibility requirement that the video card has to follow.
The minimum system requirements will depend alot more on the application that you are writing than what SDL2 does.
If you just create a standard window and render SDL will use what it can find and what it thinks is best either OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Direct3D or use the old style software rendering for machines that can't do any of the other. So if a computer can support an OS that SDL runs on then you will almost always (I just said almost since there can possible be exceptions) be able to run these type of apps (Video card not a requirement, but having one will greatly increase programs drawing speed).
You can also be creating a OpenGL application directly and then it depends on what type of context you are making what the video card has to support.
You can find most of the information here: http://wiki.libsdl.org/moin.fcg/MigrationGuide
under the Video section. It's actually how to port from 1.2 to 2.0 , but it explains the new Video Pipeline pretty well.
Hope thats what you were looking for.
I am aware that there were similar questions in past few years, but after doing some researches I still can't decide where from and what should I learn.
I would also like to see your current, actual view on modern OpenGL programming with more C++ OOP and shader approach. And get sure that my actual understanding on some things is valid.
So... currently we have OpenGL 4.2 out, which as I read somewhere requires dx11 hardware
(what does it mean?) and set of 'side' libraries, to for example create window.
There is the most common GLUT, which I extremely hate. One of main reason are function calls, which doesn't allow freedom in the way how we create main loop. As some people were telling, it was not meant for games.
There is also GLFW, which actually is quite nice and straight-forward to me. For some reason people use it with GLUT. ( which provides not only window initialisation, but also other utilities? )
And there is also SFML and SDL ( SDL < SFML imo ), whereas both of them sometimes need strange approach to work with OGL and in some cases are not really fast.
And we have also GLEW, which is extension loading utility... wait... isn't GLUT/GLFW already an extension? Is there any reason to use it, like are there any really important extensions to get interested with?
Untill now we have window creation (and some utilities), but... OGL doesn't take care of loading textures, neither 3D models. How many other libs do I need?
Let's mention education part now. There is (in)famous NeHe tutorial. Written in C with use of WinApi, with extremely unclear code and outdated solutions, yet still the most popular one. Some stuff like Red Book can be found, which are related to versions like 2.x or 3.x, however there are just few (and unfinished) tutorials mentioning 4.x.
What to go with?
So... currently we have OpenGL 4.2 out, which as I read somewhere requires dx11 hardware (what does it mean?) and set of 'side' libraries, to for example create window.
DX11 hardware is... hardware that has "supports DirectX 11" written on the side of the box. I'm not sure what it is you're asking here; are you unclear on what Direct3D is, what D3D 11 is, or what separates D3D 11 from prior versions?
FYI: D3D is a Windows-only alternative to using OpenGL to access rendering hardware. Version 11 is just the most recent version of the API. And D3D11 adds a few new things compared to D3D10, but nothing much that a beginner would need.
OpenGL is a specification that describes a certain interface for graphics operations. How this interface is created is not part of OpenGL. Therefore, every platform has its own way for creating an OpenGL context. Windows uses the Win32 API with WGL. X-Windows uses the X-Windows API with GLX functions. And so forth.
Libraries like GLUT, GLFW, etc are libraries that abstract all of these differences. They create and manage an OpenGL window for you, so that you don't have to dirty your code with platform-specific details. You do not have to use any of them.
Granted, if you're interested in learning OpenGL, it's best to avoid dealing with platform-specific minutae like how to take care of a HWND and such.
And we have also GLEW, which is extension loading utility... wait... isn't GLUT/GLFW already an extension? Is there any reason to use it, like are there any really important extensions to get interested with?
This is another misunderstanding. GLUT is a library, not an extension. An OpenGL extension is part of OpenGL. See, OpenGL is just a specification, a document. The implementation of OpenGL that you're currently using implements the OpenGL graphics system, but it may also implement a number of extensions to that graphics system.
GLUT is not part of OpenGL; it's just a library. The job of GLUT is to create and manage an OpenGL window. GLEW is also a library, which is used for loading OpenGL functions. It's not the only alternative, but it is a popular one.
Untill now we have window creation (and some utilities), but... OGL doesn't take care of loading textures, neither 3D models. How many other libs do I need?
OpenGL is not a game engine. It is a graphics system, designed for interfacing with dedicated graphics hardware. This job has nothing to do with things like loading anything from any kind of file. Yes, making a game requires this, but as previously stated, OpenGL is not a game engine.
If you need to load a file format to do something you wish to do, then you will need to either write code to do the loading (and format adjustment needed to interface with GL) or download a library that does it for you. The OpenGL Wiki maintains a pretty good list of tools for different tasks.
There is (in)famous NeHe tutorial. Written in C with use of WinApi, with extremely unclear code and outdated solutions, yet still the most popular one. Some stuff like Red Book can be found, which are related to versions like 2.x or 3.x, however there are just few (and unfinished) tutorials mentioning 4.x.
What to go with?
The OpenGL Wiki maintains a list of online materials for learning OpenGL stuff, both old-school and more modern.
WARNING: Shameless Self-Promotion Follows!
My tutorials on learning graphics are pretty good, with many sections and is still actively being worked on. It doesn't teach any OpenGL 4.x-specific functionality, but OpenGL 3.3 is completely compatible with 4.2. All of those programs will run just fine on 4.x hardware.
If you are writing a game, I would avoid things like GLUT, and write your own wrappers that will make the most sense for your game rendering architecture.
I would also avoid OpenGL 4.2 at this point, unless you only want to target specific hardware on specific platforms, because support is minimal. i.e., the latest version of Mac OSX Lion just added support for OpenGL 3.2.
For the most comprehensive coverage of machines made in the last few years, build your framework around OpenGL 2.1 and add additional support for newer OpenGL features where they make sense. The overall design should be the same. If you're only interested in targeting "current" machines, i.e. machines from late 2011 and forward, build your framework around OpenGL 3. Only the newest hardware supports 4.2, and only on Windows and some Linux. If you're interested in targeting mobile devices and consoles, use OpenGL ES 2.0.
GLEW loads and manages OpenGL Extensions, which are hardware extensions from different vendors, as opposed to GLUT which is a toolkit for building OpenGL applications, completely different things. I would highly recommend using GLEW, as it will provide a clean mechanism for determining which features are available on the hardware it is being run on, and will free you from the task of having to manually assign function pointers to the appropriate functions.
OpenGL SuperBible is a pretty good book, also check OpenGL Shading Language. Everything you do with modern OpenGL is going to involve the use of shaders - no more fixed functionality - so your biggest challenge is going to be understanding GLSL and how the shader pipelines work.
I'm currently learning modern OpenGL as well. I've also had hard time finding good resources, but here's what I've discovered so far.
I searched for a good book and ended up with OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide, which I think is the best choice for learning modern OpenGL right now. Yes, the book is about OpenGL ES, but don't let that scare you. The good thing about OpenGL ES 2.0 is that all the slow parts of the API have been removed so you don't get any bad habits from learning it while it's still very close to desktop OpenGL otherwise, with only a few features missing, which I think you can learn rather easily after you've mastered OpenGL ES 2.0.
On the other hand, you don't have the mess with windowing libraries etc. that you have with desktop OpenGL and so the book on OpenGL ES won't help you there. I think it's very subjective which libraries to use, but so far I've managed fine with SDL, ImageMagick and Open Asset Import Library.
Now, the book has been a good help, but apart from that, there's also a nice collection of tutorials teaching modern OpenGL from ground up at OpenGL development on Linux. (I think it's valid on other OSes the name nevertheless.) The book, the tutorials and a glance or two every now and then to the Orange Book have been enough in getting me understand the basics of modern OpenGL. Note that I'm still not a master in the area, but it's definitely got me started.
I agree that it's king of hard to get in to OpenGL these days when all the tutorials and examples use outdated project files, boken links etc, and if you ask for help you are just directed to those same old tutorials.
I was really confused with the NeHe tutorials at first, but when I got a little better understanding of C, compiling libraries on UNIX and other basic stuff, it all fell into place.
As far as texture loading, I can recommend SOIL:
http://www.lonesock.net/soil.html
I'm not sure but I recall I had trouble compiling it correctly, but that may have been my low experience at the time. Give me a shout if you run into trouble!
Another usefull tip is to get a Linux VM running and then you can download the NeHe Linux example code and compile it out of the box. I think you just need GLUT for it to work.
I also prefer GLFW before GLUT, mainly because GLUT isn't maintained actively.
Good luck!
The major point of modern OpenGL is tesselation and new type of shader programs so i would like to recommend to start from a standalone tutorial on OpenGL 4 tesselation, i.e: http://prideout.net/blog/?p=48
After manuals and tutorials a good follow-up is to take a look at the open-source engines out there that are based on top of "new" OpenGL 3/4. As one of the developers, I would point at Linderdaum Engine.
"Modern OpenGL programming with more C++ OOP and shader approach" makes me mention Qt. It hasn't been mentioned yet but Qt is a library that is worth learning and is the easiest way to write cross platform C++ apps. I also found it the easiest way to learn OpenGL in general since it easily handles the initialization and hardware specific code for you. Qt has it's own math libraries as well so all you need to get started with OpenGL is Qt. VPlay is a library that uses Qt to help people make games easily so there are obviously some people using Qt to make games as well.
For a short introduction to Qt and OpenGL see my post here.
I will mention that since Qt abstracts some OpenGL code, if you are trying to use the Qt wrappers, the API is slightly different than just OpenGL (although arguably simpler).
As for my vote for good tutorials or book check out Anton's OpenGL tutorials and Swiftless tutorials. Anton's ebook on Amazon is also rated higher than any other OpenGL published resource I have seen so far (and far cheaper).
By this I mean, does Cairo draw lines, shapes and everything using opengl acelerated primitives or no? and if not, a library that does this?
The OpenGL backend certainly accelerates some functions. But there are many it can't accelerate. The fact that it's written against GL 2.1 (and thus can't use more advanced features of 3.x or 4.x hardware) means that there is a lot that it simply cannot accelerate.
If you are willing to limit yourself to NVIDIA hardware, NVIDIA just came out with the NV_path_rendering extension, which provides a lot of the 2D functionality you would find with Cairo. Indeed, it's possible that you could write a Cairo backend for it. The path rendering extension is only available on GeForce 8xxx hardware and above.
It's nifty in that it's focused on the vertex pipeline. It doesn't do things like gradients or colors or whatever. That's good, because it still allows you the use of a fragment shader. Which means you get to do pretty much whatever you want ;)
Cairo is designed to have a flexible backend for rendering. It can use OpenGL for rendering, though support is still listed as "experimental" at this point. For details, see using cairo with OpenGL.
It can also output to the X Window System, Quartz, Win32, image buffers, PostScript, PDF, and SVG, and more.